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Duke University Press

Situating Ren Char: Hlderlin, Heidegger, Char and the "There Is"
Author(s): Reiner Schrmann
Source: boundary 2, Vol. 4, No. 2, Martin Heidegger and Literature (Winter, 1976), pp. 512-534
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/302151
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Situating Rene Char:


H6lderlin, Heidegger,Char and the "There Is"
Reiner Schirmann
To situate means here first of all to point out the
proper place or site of something. Secondly it means,
to heed that place or site. These two methods, placing
and heeding, are both preliminaries to a topology.
And yet it will require all our daring to take no more
than these preliminary steps in what follows. The
topology, as befits a path of thought, ends in a
question. That question asks for the location of the
site.
- Martin Heidegger

We want to situate Char's poetry. Neither the poet himself nor


the literary critic raises the question of the site. To situate a script, that is,
a way of writing determined by an understanding of being, one has to give
some thought to the locus out of which the poet speaks and writes. Where
do poets like Rene Char and Saint John Perse or, also, novelists like Peter
Handke stand if their script and speech hint at an experience with language
that seems already somehow familiar to us and yet still foreign, strange,
too "avant-garde"? To situate a work of prose or poetry is to raise the
question of its beginning: where is the place from which the script
originates?
Although such an elucidation cannot be the explicit
preoccupation of the poet himself, this does not deny him any reflective
knowledge of his own undertakings; he is not the dumb mouth of destiny.
Rather his experience with language is probably more immediate than the
philosopher's - so immediate that the question of the origin of the poetic
script will finally throw us back upon the humble, historically
conditioned, always over-determined experience with our mother-tongue.
To situate Rene Char's poetry, to question the place or site from
which it arises, requires a historical framework. Even within contemporary
literature, a post-war poet cannot write any longer as did Rimbaud, or a
post-war novelist as did Musil: in half a century our experience with
language has mutated. In poetry Rene Char is among those today whose
script manifests the threshold between a former ("modern" and therefore
still metaphysical or representational) experience of language and a
present or perhaps imminent ("postmodern," beyond metaphysical,
non-representational) experience of language and being. The historical
framework of this topology of Rene Char's poetry will remain somehow
implicit; it is that of the history of metaphysics. Char's script is localized
in relation to this history and to its end.
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Henri Matisse, "The Shark and the Gull"
"In May 1946 I sent the manuscript of the poem 'The Shark and the Gull' to Henri
Matisse at Vence. During the visit that I had paid to the great painter we had not
spoken of any poem in particular. I had convinced myself that Matisse was well and
that his treasures continued being executed with the same sumptuous regularity as
usual. Back at I'lsle-sur-Sorgue I sent him the manuscript of my poem (I love Matisse
and his discrete goodness: this poem to thank him for a precise act). He answered me
that in a recent series of drawings he had discovered the same theme. Here is one of
these drawings."
Rend Char*

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"The Shark and the Gull"


Here is one of Char's best known poems, "Le requin et la
mouette" ("The Shark and the Gull"), not previously translated into
English:1
Je vois enfin la mer dans sa triple harmonie, la mer
qui tranche de son croissant la dynastie des douleurs absurdes,
la grande voilere sauvage, la mer credule comme un liseron.
Quand je dis: j'ai leve la loi, j'ai franchi la morale, j'ai
le
coeur, ce n'est pas pour me donner raison devant ce
maill/
pese-neant dont la rumeur 6tend sa palme au dela de ma
persuasion. Mais rien de ce qui m'a vu vivre et agir jusqu'ici
n'est temoin alentour. Mon 6paule peut bien sommeiller, ma
jeunesse accourir. C'est de cela seul qu'il faut tirer richesse
immediate et operante. Ainsi, il y a un jour de pur dans
I'annee, un jour qui creuse sa galerie merveilleuse dans I' cume
de la mer, un jour qui monte aux yeux pour couronner midi.
Hier la noblesse 6tait d6serte, le rameau 6tait distant de ses
bourgeons. Le requin et la mouette ne communiquaient pas.
O Vous, arc-en-ciel de ce rivage polisseur, approchez
le navire de son esperance. Faites que toute fin supposee soit
une neuve innocence, un fievreux en avant pour ceux qui
trebuchent dans la matinale lourdeur. (FM, 197)2
(At last I see the triple harmony of the sea, whose
crescent cuts the dynasty of absurd sufferings, the great wild
aviary, the sea, credulous as a bindweed.
When I say: I overcame the law, I transgressed
morality, / unfurled the heart, it is not to justify myself before
this weigher of nothingness whose murmur extends its victory
palm beyond my persuasion. But nothing that has seen me live
and act hitherto is witness here. My shoulder may well sleep,
my youth come running. From these alone immediate and
operative riches must be drawn. Thus there is one day of
purity in the year, a day that hollows its marvelous gallery into
the sea-foam, a day that mounts into the eyes to crown the
noon. Yesterday nobility was desert, the branch was distant
from its swelling buds. The shark and the gull did not
communicate.
Oh You, rainbow of this polishing shore, bring the
ship closer to its hope. Make every supposed end be a new
innocence, a feverish advance for those who stumble in the
morning heaviness.)
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A first group of images speaks of the sea which appears triply


immense: by the thickness of its water, the width of its front, and the
depth of the horizon. The "crescent" of the sea cuts suffering: it traces a
bulging line like a woman before childbirth. The sea is the "great wild
aviary," it encloses life. Here everything is heavy. The water attracts the
stroller and invites him to plunge. Gravitation makes his sufferings fall. At
the same time the water is soft. It offers no resistance. It is "credulous as a
bindweed." These little winding lilies with slender, twining stems bend and
yield to the wind, and when the breeze is strong they even roll themselves
up. Thus the sea. Its waves follow the impulses of the atmosphere. The sea
is straight horizontality, the continuous shelter, the volume of one piece
whose docility welcomes living beings as a refuge. This insistence on the
weightiness in which life originates and is regenerated does not go beyond
traditional figures of aquatic symbolism. In Char it is inspired by the sight
of the Mediterranean.3 We shall see that the entire oceanic symbolism is
here a pre-text before the real text.
This first type of imagery is opposed by another. "I overcame the
." This sentence is printed in italics. To overcome, to transgress, to
law
... these verbs break the oceanic horizontality. They indicate a
unfurl:
rebellion. The law overcome, morality transgressed: thus the maternal
order represented by the sea is broken. Aquatic symbols are ambiguous,
since the water gives life and purifies but also drowns and kills. Char calls
the sea the "weigher of nothingness." No shelter resembles the matrix
more than the tomb. "I unfurled the heart": against the seductive rumor
the "1" stands up as if about to leap. In Rene Char the "heart" represents
precisely this sudden rise and affirmation. Another poem, "The Swift,"
begins thus: "Martinet aux ailes trop larges, qui vire et crie sa joie autour
de la maison. Tel est le coeur" (FM, 223). (Swift with wings too wide, who
turns and cries his joy around the house. Such is the heart.) The bird that
turns and cries is opposed to stability, to the established order of the
house. The heart bears the impulse to destroy all cycles. Impromptu, it
becomes infatuated. As such, Char praises a woman: "Seins pourris par ton
coeur" (NP, 40) (breasts rotten by your heart). Any repose, anything that
rests and stays put, every familiarity, threatens the heart. "Qui a creuse le
puits et hisse I'eau gisante/ Risque son coeur dans I'0cart de ses mains"
(NP, 30). (Whoever has dug a well and raises the resting waters/ Risks his
heart in the spread of his hands.) When fingers spread and imitate the
formless waters, the danger of drowsiness becomes most alarming. The
timeless protection that the water recalls and offers must be broken by a
mutinous heart. Into all systems of security, the poem seems to say, man
introduces discontinuity.
These are the two dimensions within which Char's poetry speaks:
gravity and transgression. The arrival at the seashore is one of those
moments in which they may unite. "Nothing that has seen me live and act
hitherto is witness here." Yesterday's dullness is forgotten. No one is there
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to recall torpidities. The past is no longer. The extended time, the time
that lingers, is the last fabric to be torn. Duration is the most captivating
of all dwellings, the narrowest of all prisons. Its dismissal is forcefully
urged. Char cherishes the dawns. The early morning, the moment without
precedent, makes the world rise anew, immaculate. The moment of waking
is much more than the rediscovery of things familiar. It makes the world
begin, absolutely. "Nous sommes une fois encore sans experience
anterieure, nouveaux venus, 6pris" (PA, 48). (We are once again without
previous experience, newcomers, infatuated.) The arrival upon the
seashore has something of the morning insurrection: once again we begin.
It is fatal to settle down, any establishment sacrifices the instant to
duration. "La sagesse est de ne pas s'agglombrer" (PP, 237). (Wisdom is
not to agglomerate.) Erosion and degradation threaten the freshness of the
heart. Even the reverie on the waterfront is perilous if it lasts. In "The
Word in Archipelago," Char says, "Ne regardez qu'une fois la vague jeter
I'ancre dans la mer" (PA, 152). (Give but a quick look on the wave casting
its anchor in the sea.) Everything that stablizes itself diminishes.
The symbols of the shoulder and of youth, curiously associated in
the poem, signify the same departure. "My shoulder may well sleep, my
youth come running." They belong together. The shoulder, the angle of
the torso, points upwards as a volcano does, says the "Pulverized Poem":
"Violente I'6paule s'entr'ouvre;/ Muet apparait le volcan" (FM, 178).
(With violence the shoulder opens partway;/ the volcano appears, mute.)
To be a child, to be constantly on the edge of a departure, is Char's
"privilege." In a commentary on the "Pulverized Poem" he writes: "Moi
qui jouis du privilege de sentir tout ensemble accablement et confiance,
defection et courage, je n'ai retenu personne sinon I'angle fusant d'une
Recontre" (A-H, 20). (1 enjoy the privilege of feeling all together dejection
and confidence, defection and courage; still I have never retained anyone
except the spurting angle of an Encounter [italics added].) Rare are the
lives that resemble an eruption, new at each moment; rare is the resolution
of duration into the instant. "There is one day of purity in the year."
The key to this poem is the opposition between duration and
instant, massive horizontality and vertical takeoff. Actually it is a poem
about poetry. The one pure day "hollows its marvelous gallery into the
sea-foam, a day that mounts into the eyes to crown the noon." This rare
day, this instant, reconciles weight and lightness, submission and
transgression, the dive and the flight, or again the oceanic spread and
man's freedom. The docile sea and man in revolt belong to each other in
the poem. The entire poem hastens the union of the two dimensions. It is
a call to fuse sedentary life and departure, to establish oneself on the road.
"Epouse et n'6pouse pas ta maison" (FM, 99). (Espouse and do not
espouse your home.)
The Now of the poem abolishes yesterday's dispersions and
separations. "Yesterday... the shark and the gull did not communicate."
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In the now of the poem the shark and the gull do communicate at last.
The gull is constant leaving, vertical flight, whereas the shark settles in the
depth, gravity is its shelter. The gull has no refuge. When both communicate,
the rainbow appears, offspring of the light and water drops. The sky and
the ocean mingle. The poem aspires to the union of the two opposite
dimensions down to the prayer that concludes it: "Make every supposed
end be a new innocence, a feverish advance for those who stumble in the
morning heaviness." The morning heaviness - this is the supreme paradox
which translates Char's dream of unity. The morning is the hour of rising,
of innocent beginning, of the gull. Heaviness is of the impenetrable sea, of
the house, of the shark. As if a lightning flash, the poem makes me a
unifier. Reality is antinomic, but the heart, man, or the poet unites. The
language of the poem is the multiple matter in which things diverse and
opposite enter into relation.

Not One Origin,Two


We now possess a first element for a topology of Char's poetry.
We asked: where is the place from which it speaks? Where is its origin? The
answer is clearer now: the origin lies somehow within the poem itself.
Only when and insofar as the poem is spoken or understood do the
dimensions of the shark and the gull communicate. The realm of the poem
begins with its utterance. For a brief moment a world is opened in which
the opposite is one - even more: in which the world is "world," that is,
there for man. In Char's poetry an experience comes to language which is
properly an experience of the origin. However, this origin is not distinct
from the script of the poem itself. In or with the poem the world begins.
Char'slanguage is originary in the sense that it is itself the origin of what the
poem achieves. We take the word "origin" literally: oriri, to rise, to
appear, to come forth. Thus we say that language here gives rise to poetry
which in turn gives rise to a world unified. Yet to claim that Char's script
is originary implies no reference to anything mythical; the origin is not the
inception of some process or history. Rather, when the poem is said and
understood, the world just begins. But its world lasts as briefly as the
poem itself. "La vitalite du porte n'est pas une vitalit6 de I'au-delA mais Lin
point diament6 actuel de presences transcendantes et d'orages pelerins"
(FM, 78). (The vitality of the poet is not a vitality of the beyond, but an
actual diamond point of transcending presences and migrating storms.)
Thus this poetry is entirely of the earth; it has no other ground, no
mythical foundation: it refers to language alone as its provenance; it
founds a world which is inseparable from its speech. To understand Char is
to see that this passionate celebration of the pure "there is" and this
violent exclusion of any "it was" constitute the very structure of his
script. If poetry still remains mysterious, if the presence is still called
"transcending," this points solely towards the unspeakable subject-matter
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of poems such as "The Shark and the Gull," namely the mere presence of
what is present. The subject-matter here is the visibility of the visible.
"Quoique affaire terrestre, comme la vie dont elle est I'endroit victorieux
du temps, claire ou opaque, la poesie reste un mystere en acte" (A-H, 11).
(Although it is a matter of the earth, just as life whose right side,
victorious over time, it is, poetry, whether clear or opaque, remains a
mystery in act.)
Two notions of the origin appear to be phenomenologically
defensible: the origin as the presence of what is present, and the origin as
cause. The first may be described as nuptial: Char's poem announces the
nuptials of the shark and the gull. The second may be called natal:
cosmogonies speak of the cause or nascency of the world. Both notions
imply an event, but nuptials occur in the present whereas nascency is a
happening of the past, of the beginning of an era. It should be understood
that Char's situation - the origin is not remote but is the presence of the
present - disrupts the epistemological continuity that, in the eyes of
theoreticians of symbolic forms, links poetic to mythological language.
This kind of epistemological continuity may still characterize modern
poetry, but it becomes undone already with Rimbaud. A myth relates
events that occurred in illo tempore. The ritual by which the myth is
celebrated revives these events for today so that history begins again:
incipit vita nova. The important point is that in the innumerable
manifestations of the sacred, the origin addresses man according to either
temporal mode: the myth recalls and thus calls upon its believer. This
double temporality belongs to the essence of any myth, at least to its basic
forms, which are cosmogonic and soteriological. On the one hand such a
myth remembers:

"In the beginning there was . . ."; on the other hand it

exhorts: "This is the day


." The myth's double temporality, recalling
...
and calling, is due to its essentially
etiological intent. Recollection instates
a duration, namely the time since those early days when the gods made or
visited or saved the earth. Exhortation yields a presence, a renewed
existence. Birth and rebirth, the origin as nascency and as nuptials,
constitute properly the mythological time-structure. The word "religion,"
whether understood as re-legere or as re-ligare, suggests this link between
present and past. All forms of the sacred draw their energy from the
conjunction of these two modes in which the origin shows itself: the
preservation of a message from the past and the exigency of a new hearing
and a new existence in the present.
Thus, phenomenologically, "origin" designates two events. Char
is so important to us because his poetry excludes violently any such
amphibology. He rejects mythical or religious etiologies and turns
deliberately to the actual happening in language of the presence of things
present. His script reflects a particular understanding of time. The divine is
no more; duration, which tied man back to his beginnings, is expunged
from time. "Quand s'6branla le barrage de I'homme, aspire par la faille
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g6ante de I'abandon du divin, des mots dans le 'lointain, des mots qui ne
voulaient pas se perdre, tentirent de r6sister
I'exorbitante poussee"
(A-H, 29). (When man's dam was shaken, sucked in by the giant rift of the
desertion of the divine, words afar, words that did not want to get lost,
tried to resist the exorbitant thrust.) The words of poetry have thus come
to be simple words of the earth, words of today. Cut off from their
numinous roots they have no glorious history to extol but only that glory
which human eyes can see. The poet fulfills his task of manifesting the
visible with "l'effort, le courage et I'amour" (A-H, 29) (with effort,
courage and love). However, he is not the only one to bring the visible to
speech. The fullness of language is not entrusted to him alone. He is only
one of "les rescapes en si petit nombre" (A-H, 29) (the rescued in so small
a number). Who are the others, his companions? Those who know how to
converse. Language is primarily dialogue. In an era deprived of the divine,
language manifests its essence in the discourse between humans. The
rescued ones (from the collapse of religious creed into technological
dogma) experience the unique sense of "mystery" or "transcendence" that
remains in Char's poetry: the simple presence of one dialogue partner to
the other. This presence, as that of the shark to the gull, although it occurs
in language, is irreducible to the words exchanged in dialogue.
The difference between the presence and what is present does not
construct a new afterworld, a new beyond; and yet, the unity that
language establishes between the shark and the gull or between two
speakers is not simply the sum of the beings that it brings together. Char's
language is mundane, it is deprived of otherworldly roots, but it is not
one-dimensional. It operates a communication that is not limited to man.
A poem is a "mystere qui intronise" (FM, 83) (a mystery that enthrones).
Perhaps we are to understand poetry in a very large sense here: "Tu es
dans ton essence constamment porte" (A-H, 47). (You are in your essence
constantly a poet.) In the collection Formal Divide, many sentences begin
with "In poetry ...,"

as if poetry were some separate domain of

'language.
But elsewhere Char simply says, "Man...." "II y a un homme present
'
debout, un homme dans un champ de seigle, un champ pareil un choeur
mitraill6, un champs sauve" (FM, 40). (There is man now, standing, a man
in a field of rye, a field similar to a choir peppered with gunfire, a field
that is saved.) The man who saves the field here is evidently the poet. But
not necessarily the professional versemaker: any word that gathers
together (in German dichten, to poetize, suggests dicht, intense, together,
concentrated) is poetic. Language is at home in the now that gathers
together. In "The Shark and the Gull," this gathering is symbolized by the
"marvelous gallery" hollowed in sea-foam. Other texts suggest that here
again the symbol is meant to evoke the poem itself: Char calls the poem
"le tunnel derobe," "la chambre d'harmonie," "la piste captieuse" (the
hidden tunnel, the chamber of harmony, the captious track) and the poet
"dans la chambre devenue Igere, le donneur de liberte" (FM, 37) (the
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giver of freedom in the chamber now turned light). In that sense any
human whose speech is responsible deserves the epitaph written for a poet:
'
"Enlev6 par I'oiseu I'6parse douleur,/ Et laiss6 aux forets pour un travail
d'amour" (PA, 92). (Taken away by the bird from the scattered suffering/
And left to the forests for a work of love.)
The poem thus realizes the unity of the world that it signifies. It
does not only press for a new existence. If man constantly poetizes, his
speech brings together the dimensions of the world, the lightness of the
bird and the gravity of the forest. But the poem realizes the unity that it
signifies only for the moment of its articulation. Its world springs up and
founders immediately. Success here does not abolish desire: "le poeme est
I'amour realise du desir demeur6 desir" (FM, 76). (The poem is the
realized love of desire remaining desire.) By its nature the poem is an
ephemeral victory over dispersion and dislocation.
In the poem all things just begin. "Le porte, grand Commenceur"
(FM, 83) (the poet, great Beginner), says Char. Again, this beginning is
neither mythical nor religious. The presence that it inaugurates neither
founds anything nor even lasts. The poem only lends a voice to the
presence of things, it is the elocution of their pure presence. It opens for
them a space where they belong to each other. The poem lets them be. It
lets be whatever is. Thus it operates the identity of the non-identical. "Le
po'te peut alors voir les contraires... aboutir, poesie et verit6, comme
nous savons, etant synonymes" (FM, 72). (The poet can then see things
contrary come to their end.. . poetry and truth, as we know, being
synonymous.)
The truth of things, their instantaneous blooming, does not last in
a poetry whose origin is nothing divine but only language itself. Truth
realizes itself "sometimes": "L'homme n'est qu'une fleur de I'airtenue par
le souffle et I'ombre de cette coalition, certaines fois, le
la terre...;
surel vent" (PA, 81). (Man is only a flower of the air held by the
earth . . .; the breath and the shadow of this coalition

sometimes

elevate

him.) Hardly achieved, this presence is already regretted: "Oiseaux qui


'
confiez votre gracilite, votre sommeil perilleux un ramas de roseaux, le
froid venu, comme nous nous ressemblons!" (NT, 43). (You, bird, who
entrust your frailty, your perilous sleep to a heep of reeds, when the cold
has come how we resemble one another!)

TheHymn to the Rhine


With Rene Char the origin of poetic script lies in the mere
present: the poet, "great Beginner," discloses a meaning which is always
new. The origin appears as nuptials. Char spells "Beginner" with a capital
letter: the poet's ministry is to establish an order. In the poem, the shark
and the gull are present, belong at last to each other. When silence comes
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back, chaos rules again: "Le poete ne retient pas ce qu'il decouvre; I'ayant
transcrit, il le perd aussit6t. En cela reside sa nouveaut6" (PA, 73). (The
poet does not retain what he discloses; as soon as he has transcribed it he
loses it. In that lies his novelty.) The Beginning is to be understood as
instantaneous novelty. It is to this sudden nakedness of the world that
Char dedicates his effort. "Great Beginner" is a polemic title: Char's battle
is delivered against mythological origins, against any reference to ancestral
incipiencies. It is on this decisive understanding of the origin that Char
differs radically from another poet, H61derlin, whom he otherwise
resembles in many respects. Char and H61derlin know of only one
subject-matter of poetry, poetry itself. They share the same predilection
for rivers. But running waters as a symbol of the poem do not mean the
same thing in one and the other. The situation of H1olderlinis not the same
as Char's.
"Quand on a mission d'?veiller, on commence par faire sa toilette
riviere"
dans la
(PP, 237). (When one has the mission to rouse, one begins
with washing in the river.) The rouser begins, and so does the river. No one
enters twice the same river, Heraclitus is reported to have said. The running
water is at every moment young. Each dive is like a dive into a fountain of
youth: the coolness begins, as violent as a child. The same is true for the
poet. The communion that he institutes appears suddenly and immediately
dissolves. "La poesie est de toutes les eaux claires celle qui s'attarde le
moins aux reflets de ses ponts" (PP, 94). (Poetry is of all clear waters the
one that lingers the least with the reflections of its bridges.) The poet
dwells in white waters, as the trout. He settles in unhabitable elements.
"L'6clair me dure" (PA, 72). (Lightning makes me last.) Char calls the
I'6clair finit et ob
Sorgue River of his native Vaucluse "rivibre
ouJ lightning ends and
commence ma maison" (FM, 218) (the river where
where my house begins). He wants all humans to dare to choose the
unstable. "Donne aux enfants de mon pays le visage de ta passion"
(FM, 218). (Give the children of my country the face of your passion.)
The Sorgue River operates a departure, everything it touches becomes
effulgence. Even the earth splinters into thousands of particles and
movements: "Rivibre, en toi terre est frisson" (FM, 218). (River, in you
the earth is shiver.) The praise of the Sorgue ends with this request:
"Rivire au coeur jamais detruit dans ce monde fou de prisons,/
Garde-nous violent et ami des abeilles de I'horizon" (FM, 219). (You,
river, whose heart is never destroyed in this world mad with prisons, keep
us violent and friends of the bees on the horizon.) Only an indestructible
heart can will the anti-compact, the explosive fever of a swarm of bees.
And such a heart alone can ally a pulverized systole with a sedentary,
earthy diastole. Such a heart is made to the image of the river: violent in
the fragmentations that it operates and nevertheless constant in its run.
Such is also the paradox of poetic language: "obscurit6 pr6natale et
lumiere" (PA, 73) (prenatal obscurity as well as light).
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Let us now listen to Holderlin. In 1801 he finished the hymn


entitled "The Rhine." Here are its first lines:
Im dunkeln Efeu sass ich, an der Pforte
Des Waldes, eben, da der goldene Mittag,
Den Quell besuchend, herunterkam
Von Treppen des Alpengebirges,
Das mir die g6ttlichgebaute,
Die Burg der Himmlischen heisst
Nach alter Meinung, wo aber
Geheim noch manches entschieden
Zu Menschen gelanget; von da
Vernahm ich ohne Vermuten
Ein Schicksal....
Jetzt aber, drin im Gebirg,
Tief unter den silbernen Gipfeln
Und unter frohlichem Grin,
Wo die Walder schauernd zu ihm
Und der Felsen Haupter ubereinander
Hinabschaun, taglang, dort
Im kaltesten Abgrund h6rt'
Ich um Erl6sung jammern
Den Jingling, es h6rten ihn, wie er tobt',
Und die Mutter Erd 'anklagt'
Und den Donnerer, der ihn gezeuget,
Erbarmend die Eltern, doch
Die Sterblichen flohn von dem Ort,
Denn furchtbar war, da lichtlos er
In den Fesseln sich wilzte,
Das Rasen des Halbgotts.
Die Stimme wars des edelsten der Str6me,
Des freigeborenen Rheins ... 4
(I sat among dark ivy at the forest's gate just as
golden noon, to visit the source, descended from the
steps of the Alpine ranges, for me the divinely-built, the
castle of the Heavenly, following old opinion, whence
even yet many a secred decree reaches men; and thus I
unsuspectingly

received

a destiny.

. Amidst

the

mountains, deep down below the snowy summits and


under the jubilant green, where the shuddering forests
and, craning over each other, the crags look down upon
him all day long, I now heard in the coldest abyss the
youth wail for release; there, as he raged, accusing Mother
Earth and the Thunderer who begot him, his pitying
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parents heard him, too; but the mortals fled from the
place, for as he writhed without light in his fetters,
terrible was the demi-god's raving. It was the voice of the
noblest of rivers, the free-born Rhine.)

The hymn begins with a description of the Alps. According to the


myth, they are the fortress of the gods, of heavenly architecture. From
these heights the gods still send decrees whose destiny or "mittance"
(Schicksal, from schicken, to send) the poet, "I," receives and grasps (So

vernahmich ohne Vermuthenein Schicksal). These decrees are rough;


within the desolate scenery of rocks a youth, son of the Earth and the
Thunderer, writhes in his chains. It is the Rhine who fights furiously his
way through the rocky masses. H61derlin calls him the "noblest of rivers,"
a demi-god. In H61derlin as in Char, the river symbolizes the poem; in both
cases also it unites duration and instant, the solid and the light or the
lightning. The son of the gods is "saxifragous," the rock breaker. Char
dedicated a poem to H61derlin entitled "Pour un Promethee saxifrage. En
touchant la main 6olienne de H1olderlin"(PA, 125) ("For a Saxifragous
Prometheus. Touching the Eolian Hand of H61derlin"). It begins thus: "La
realit6 sans I'6nergie disloquante de la poesie, qu'est-ce?" (Reality without
the dislocating energy of poetry, what would that be?) The violence of the
young and raving Rhine symbolizes the violent rise of the poetic word.
Char probably also has H1olderlinin mind when he writes in Formal Divide:
"Fureur et mystere tour a le seduisirent et le consumbrent. Puis vint
I'ann'e qui acheva son agonie de saxifrage" (FM, 70). (Furor and mystery
seduced and consumed him by turns. Then came the year that concluded
his saxifragous agony.) It was fatal for H6olderlinto unite lightning and the
earth, furor and mystery. Five years after he had finished "The Rhine" he
fell into madness. One has even the impression that Char paraphrases the
first lines of the hymn: "Nous regardions couler devant nous I'eau
se chassant de ses flancs
grandissante. Elle effac;ait d'un coup la montagne,
'
maternels. Ce n'6tait pas un torrent qui s'offrait son destin mais une bate
ineffable dont nous devenions la parole et la substance" (FM, 222). (We
watched the growing water flow before us. It wiped out the mountain in a
single blow, breaking forth from its motherly womb. It was not a torrent
that offered itself to its destiny, but an ineffable beast whose word and
substance we became.)
If examined more closely, however, the difference between Char's
and H61derlin's use of the river symbol, and therefore the difference
between their ways to understand the poem, is radical. All along its
current the Rhine is seen by H61derlin close to its source. The poet's
mediation remains near the origin of the divine decrees: "Ein Ratsel ist
Reinentsprungenes. Auch/ Der Gesang kaum darf es enthiillen" (Werke,
315). (A riddle is what is of pure origin, song itself may hardly disclose it.)
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Wherever the Rhine passes, it is "pure origin." The poet's utterances


remain thoroughly faithful to the "heavenly" messages which, "beyond
reach mankind
by his mediation. "Ein Raitsel ist
question,"
this
means
something different now from "porte,
Reinentsprungenes"
grand Commenceur," the poet, great Beginner. If Char's ministry consists
merely in lending a voice to what is present in as much as present,
H61derlin's hermeneutic function is one of translating and transmitting.
The origin that addresses man in H61derlin's poetry is sacred, arises from
elsewhere. Whereas Char announces the nuptials of what is visible,
H61derlin turns back towards the invisible nascency of which he is the
servant and the herald. The entire hymn exalts this presence of the natal,
not yet nuptial origin; it is a hymn to man's wandering identity with his
birth.
Und sch6n ists, wie er drauf,
Nachdem er die Berge verlascen,
Stillwandelnd sich im deutschen Lande
Begnigt. ....
Doch nimmer, nimmer vergisst ers.
Denn eher muss die Wohnung vergehn,
Und die Satzung und zum Unbild werden
Der Tag der Menschen, ehe vergessen
Ein solcher dirfte den Ursprung
Und die reine Stimme der Jugend. (Werke, 316-7)
(How fair is the way he now, after leaving the
But he
mountains, glides onward in calm content....
never, never forgets. For sooner the dwelling shall perish,
and the laws, and the day of men become a calamity,
than such as he forget the origin and the pure voice of
youth.)
These lines express HlIderlin's human ideal: the nearness of the
past inception and the memory of the pure voice of our early years. The
poem speaks of the ideal itself as much as of its loss. Hl1derlin's time, our
time, is the one where the gods seem to be no more. Rivers have become
factors of calculus in the navigation business and cheap means of industrial
evacuation and refrigeration. This is the age of the night to which
Holderlin opposes the age of the day, that is, early Greece.
Aber weh! es wandelt in Nacht, es wohnt, wie im Orkus,
Ohne G6ttliches unser Geschlecht. Ans eigene Treiben
Sind sie geschmiedet allein, und sich in der tosenden Werkstatt
H6ret jeglicher nur. ... (Werke, 290)
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(But alas! today's mankind errs through the


night, it dwells as though in hades, deprived of the
divine. They all are solely enchained to their own
agitation, and in the middle of the boisterous workshop
everyone hears only himself.)
An age such as ours must again learn how to listen. Hence the sanctity
of H61derlin's mediations. A human being close to the source, the
poet, does what the river does. He transmits the life-giving decrees of the
gods to the mortal inhabitants of the valleys. At each step he remembers
his early beginnings. He remains impetuous. He is the mediator who
consumes himself in his task. When Hblderlin feels madness imminent, he
compares himself to the demi-god Tantalus "who received from the gods
more than he could digest." To be a poet is not a matter of talent. The
poem succeeds when the natal origin, the mystery of birth, becomes
language. The saying of the poem is the arrival of the gods. As a demi-god,
the poet experiences the lasting nearness of the archd. Only when the gods
grant their presence do his stammerings become a poem. The hymn
"Patmos" says: "Nah ist/ Und schwer zu fassen der Gott" (Werke, 328).
(Near, and yet hard to grasp, is the god.) In fact, the poet does not seize.
Rather he is seized, "struck by Apollo."
H61derlin's poems thus preserve a certain past; they enunciate
both the ancientness and the nearness of our provenance: the ancient glory
of language as incantation is the terrible privilege of those who dare
remember. The origin is here understood as proximity of the divine,
forgotten though it is in needy times. The man of this proximity is
necessarily a stranger. Only in that condition can he, "like the god of wine,
render intelligible to the heart the language of the purest ones," that is, of
the gods (Werke, 318). The poem is divine speech, the only one that we
still possess. By such an elevation of everyday words into hymnic song,
language comes into its own.
H61derlin's situation is that of the end of metaphysics: the divine
ground holds no more, the foundations appear shaken. What used to be
the most powerful presence, the divine, has fallen into oblivion. Only the
poet remembers. What, then, is Char's situation? In his poetry there is no
regretfulness of sacred decrees, no recollection. The site from which he
speaks is nothing mythical, not "a stronghold of the Heavenly," no
"sacred Alps," but man's own language in its humble event. Char's
situation is properly postmodern, perhaps beyond metaphysics altogether.
It may be that Char says less than H61derlin: no holy injunctions are
transmitted. It may be that he says also less than Nietzsche: no madman
cries after God. But in saying apparently less, does he not speak from
another locus, still too novel to think of, a place beyond representations
and beyond that threshold where the overcoming of metaphysics is still
the dominant problem? In that case H6olderlinwould have experienced the
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decline of the truth of being, and particularly the decline of the truth of
the supreme being. Since the very quest for certainty, security, and
salvation has become meaningless in his situation, Char points more
decidedly towards a new beginning. Yet Char's project has nothing to do
with the simplifying label "atheism," but very much with a new thought
of being. The truth of being lies no more in the principle of reason and in
logic, but in the princeps, the beginning, which the logos as poetic speech
is itself.
Both Hilderlin and Char poetize the origin. But in Char the
dimensions of the visible communicate due to his script; his poem
exists when the visibility of the visible alone becomes language. In
H1lderlin a restoration occurs; the natal origin - in the mythical sense, as
he states explicitly - addresses a mortal race that has forgotten its own
essence. The task of Holderlin's hymn is to recall the divine as one calls
back a fugitive. "The Rhine" ends precisely with the wedding between the
mortals and the immortals:
Dann feiern das Brautfest Menschen und G6tter,
Es feiern die Lebenden all,
Und ausgeglichen ist eine Weile das Schicksal.
(Werke, 319)
(Then gods and men celebrate their nuptials, all the
living celebrate, and Destiny becomes equal for a while.)
For the time of the poem the difference between mortal and immortal is
abolished. It is not by chance that H1olderlincomposes "hymns," whereas
Char renounces any kind of praise or acclamation. Hymnos, in Greek,
designates primitively the "hymen" songs that were accompanied by flutes
and lyres. The songs are started off by the friends that guide the young
couple to the bridegroom's house. H1olderlin'shymns are hymeneals of the
mortal and the immortal. In contrast, the only wedding Char admits of is
that of the dimensions of the earth, of the shark and the gull, but never of
heaven and earth. Char's ontological situation lies above - or underneath
- whatever might resemble "une vitalit6 de I'au-dela" (FM, 78) (a vitality
of the beyond).
In H61derlin's view a double giving takes place in poetry. On the
one hand the poet assists the mortals, to whom he points out the originary
road to follow:
Nachdem er lachelnd auch
Der Menschen geschaftiges Leben
Das odemarme, wie Segel
Mit seinen Luften gelenkt hat.... (Werke, 319)
(He steers the busy life of men, short-breathed as it is,
like sails, with his own inexhaustible breezes.)
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But on the other hand, as a mediator, the poet also gives to the gods. The
wedding that he calls for also profits the immortals: to the "most-blessed"
he offers his fragility. This fulfills their only need:
Bedurfen die Himmlischen eines Dings,
So sind's... Sterbliche. Dann
Muss wohl, wenn solches zu sagen
Erlaubt ist, in der Gotter Namen
Teilnehmend fihlen ein andrer,
Den brauchen sie .... (Werke, 317)
"If one need remains to the Celestials, that need is for mortals." Gods are
impassible, suffering is unknown to them. Therefore, "if to say such a
compassionate and feel on their
thing is permitted, another must
behalf." In need of mortals, the gods be.
use, brauchen, the poet. To bear such
usage and such usury he has only his endurance to count upon. His
happiness is of the weightiest kind.
Nur hat ein jeder sein Mass.
Denn schwer ist zu tragen
Das Ungluck, aber schwerer das GlIck. (Werke, 319)
(Each has his measure. For hard though to bear is
unhappiness, still harder is happiness.)
Around him men breathlessly render the night more comfortable. But the
poet "knows God." He has been measured with the double gauge of divine
and human needs. He remains the wailing youth, guardian of the source
and guarded by it. As the hermeneuts, the priests at Delphi, he goes back
and forth between the oracle and the people's square. His sayings are
essentially interpretative.
Denn schonend riihrt des Masses allzeit kundig
Nur einen Augenblick die Wohnungen der Menschen
Ein Gott an.... (Werke, 308)
(A god, always heedful of measure, touches as a guard in
a single moment upon the dwellings of man.)
Man's dwelling, language, which is thus "touched" by the divine, is the
poem.
H61derlin's concept of origin is both mythical (mainly in the
hymns) and historical (in his translations and aesthetic writings). In either
case, though, what he recalls is early Greece. The contrast with Char is
evident. There is no sacred dimension of existence or of history that
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speaks through Char's poems and whose recollection would be entrusted


to the poet. What does speak in Char's verse is the ephemeral harmony of
mortal speech which for an unsettled existence builds and unbuilds
instantaneous dwellings.
"There Is" in the Poem
It is not enough to say that in Holderlin's poetry the origin
appears as mythical and remote, and in Char's as actual and present. Nor
have we understood the situation of Char once his script has been labeled
post-metaphysical. The event of language by which the origin manifests
itself in his poetry needs to be questioned for its own sake. Hl1derlin
thinks the era of Western history and tries to renew its early vitality, its
divine infancy. In this sense his poetry is a memorial. As a recollection and
as a revival it opens the space of a second beginning. Char seems to retain
only the contemporaneous part of the essentially ambivalent language of
the origin, smothering its romantic overtones. Only the present instant
remains: "La lumiere a un age. La nuit n'en a pas. Mais quel fut I'instant
de cette source entiere?" (NT, 34). (Light has an age. The night has none.
But which was the instant of that integral source?)
In the poem there is the sea; there are the Sorgue River and the
Rhine; there is the shark communicating with the gull. But prior to all this
there is in the poem the "there is" itself. Since Rimbaud, the poem has
said: whatever is, is. Sometimes it takes a more pressing tone, when it says:
whatever is, may that be. But this wish that it formulates is fulfilled right
away. What is at stake in the poem is the presence of everything to
everything. Only the presence. Not an intention, but the intonation alone.
Rimbaud is the poet of poetry when he writes in his Illuminations:
There is a clock that does not ring.
There is a quagmire with a nest of white birds.
There is a cathedral ...
There is a small car ....

The same celebration of what is purely present is found in Apollinaire's


Calligraphies:
There is a vessel that has taken away my beloved.
There are six sausages in the sky ....
There is an enemy submarine ....
and so on, for twenty-four "there is's."6
Is all this to say that poems such as these and Char's eliminate
any difference from language? Is their verse content with the beautiful
sequences of auditory and visual elements? Against theories of structural
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linguists, it is clear that the "there is" introduces by itself a difference, a


mystery, if that is the word, which neither turns our eyes away (as it does
in H61lderlin)from the purely visible and audible nor keeps them rivited to
the order of words and things that make up the poem (as, for instance, in
Roman Jakobson's theory). Thus the question of the situation of Rene
Char's poetry, the question of how the origin has to be understood in his
script, becomes the question of identity and difference in the "there is."
We may even be entitled to go a step beyond Char, to risk the defoliation
of our anthologies, and to concentrate our attention not upon the things
shown, but upon the showing itself. When the poem is said, things are
present, reconciled, called together by its speech. This recognition of their
being-there is probably common to all poetry we know of. But being-there
is not the being that is there. The present is different from the thing
present, as the visibility of the thing shown is different from the shark and
the gull that the poem makes visible.
The poem is the burning articulation of a desire: may all things be
there. May pure presence be. Even more, it announces and already realizes
what it desires. The dimensions of the earth communicate, but this
communication is not the water and the sky, or gravity and transgression.
The poem is the tangible sign, offered to our eyes, our ears, our lips, that
all is one, that mere presence is. The poem is the color of hereness, its
fulgor and its splendor. The difference that the "there is" introduces into
the poem is the difference between the presence and the things present or
the visibility and what is rendered visible.
The German idiomatic expression es gibt, "there is," means
"it
literally
gives." "Among dark ivy at the forest's gate" there is the river.
Holderlin thinks the es gibt literally when he continues: "A riddle is what
is of pure origin." One may ask: what is it that gives? The Alps give the
Rhine. The gods give destiny. However, that which gives cannot be
properly named. But out of that region, we are told, "secretly much,
beyond question, still reaches man." That which gives is the origin of
presence. It gives presence. When the poem calls all things together, they
are mysteriously granted to us, bestowed by That which gives. In order to
understand the essence of poetry, solely the provenance of this giving
deserves to be questioned. Heidegger sees in this idiomatic turn es gibt the
possibility of a new examination of ontology: "the memorable is what
gives food for thought. .... The memorable grants."7 The source of a river
is memorable, it remains so down to the estuary. "As you began you
remain" ("The Rhine"). Heidegger comments: "We try to carry our sight
towards that which gives and towards its giving, and we spell the 'It' with a
capital letter."8 That which gives is different from what it gives.
There are thus three semantic layers that we have to distinguish
carefully: the things present (the shark and the gull), their presence (the
poetic speech or script), and the event of the presencing (the essence of
poetic language). In the vocabulary of Heidegger's writings of the 1930's:
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beings, beingness, and Being. Or in the vocabulary of On Time and Being:


das Anwesende, das Anwesenlassen, das Anwesenlassen. Based upon the
difference that the German expression "there is" suggests, this threefold
layer gives an answer to any inquiry into the way things and words are
present in a poem. Both H61derlin and Heidegger give witness to this
Germanic way of speaking and therefore of thinking.
Superficially the "es gibt" of Heidegger (commenting on
H61derlin) resembles Rimbaud's "il ya" and the English "there is." But
the similarity is deceptive, as the kinship between H61derlin and Char is
deceptive. "Es gibt" and "there is" belong to two different worlds. Both
the English "there is" and the French "il y a" eliminate any mythical
reminiscence from the poem. This is not so with "esgibt," particularly
when spelled with a capital letter. Hence the danger of misunderstanding
some of Heidegger's latest writings. The invitation to silence before the
mystery of That which gives, as well as Heidegger's reference to Holderlin,
may easily mislead the reader. Even in his texts about the event of
presencing, it is still the visibility of the visible that is thought of. Thus he
is closer to the way of thinking that says "there is" or "il y a" than to
H61derlin's hymn "The Rhine" and the recollection into divine mittances
as implied by "esgibt." If Heidegger still speaks of the sacred and of the
mystery, this must be understood in Char's way: the communication of
the dimensions of the earth is sacred; the presencing of the essence of
language that renders things present is mysterious. "There is" and "il y a"
tell more humbly the proximity of being than Heidegger's own
mother-language.
Char's poetry is far from any celebration of non-human grantings,
from any grace or giving. It expresses nothing more than the spectacle of
what is. H61derlin's poetry, or the "Esgibt," implies a stretched-out
temporality, a return to the beginnings. Char's poetry, or the "il y a" and
the "there is," in the purely vertical temporality of the instant, consumes
horizontal history as the lightning consumes the day. On this point some
of Char's titles may lead to confusion: "Retour amont," or "Le nu perdu"
("Return Upstream," "Nudity Lost"). But in no way does Char display
the nostalgia for a lost paradisaic nudity, and the return upstream is not an
ascent to the causes. Rather, "amont 6clate" (NP, 48) (upstream bursts).
The only path that Char traces for us leads to the being-there of what is
there.
Char's situation is beyond metaphysics insofar as the pure "there
is" to which he gives voice destroys causal scaffoldings. Thus the armistices
concluded both by H6lderlin and by Char are of opposite terms.
H61derlin's hymns are the script of an Absent. They are the presence of
this Absent qua absent. That which grants H61derlin's poems to be the
locus of reconciliation between man and his origin arises from elsewhere.
H61derlin's poetry settles a momentary armistice between man and the
sacred. In Char the armistice is between a carnivorous beast, the shark, and
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the light-feathered gull, both of which are there in his poetry, belonging to
each other and appropriating each other. In H61lderlinthe cities founded
by the legislating stream are from elsewhere, from the gods. "Then man
and gods celebrate their nuptials." Heidegger's interpretation of this line
refers again to the Absent which, through the text, becomes present. These
weddings, he writes, celebrate "the encounter of those among men and
gods who give birth to the mediators between men and gods and who
endure this intermediacy."9 In other words, out of this wedlock the poet
is born. The offspring carries the mark of what is absent into the present.
Poetry is that section of language in which being lets itself be
explicitly experienced as event and as appropriation. But each native
tongue prepares for this event and this appropriation a dwelling which is
particular to it. The German "es gibt" comprises a difference between
what is shown and its origin; this language lives from such a reference to
what is absent, or from the manifestation of the non-manifest. It is a
The German language experiences the
metaphysical
language.
appropriating event as the intrusion of a distinct and forgotten origin into
the customary proximity. The poet's saying is here understood as a
translation: he translates to our ears the anonymous gift by which the
poem lets whatever is be present. The poet is the guard of this gift, and
inversely this gift guards (schont, hitet) him.
The French and English languages stay among what they show but radically. "// y a" and "there is" open a difference between what is
and its presence. The poem makes the purity of the there be seen. It is as
mysterious as the sun at noon, which is the sun "and" which is there.
Without involving any double, any invisible afterworld, Char's poetry and
the tongue in which it is written live within this difference, between things
of the earth and their being-there. Char is the poet of the visible mystery
for whom and by whom presence is different from things present but not
other than they, hence also identical with them.
As for the English language, one nuance is striking in this
context: "there is" applies in English both to human existence (Dasein,
&tre-la) and to the more general presence of beings (Es gibt, il y a). The
lack of this distinction in English reveals perhaps another kind of ontology
which would have to be worked out from contemporary poetry in that
language.
New School for Social Research
NOTES
1

All translations which follow the original texts in parentheses are mine.

In the references to Rend Char's works, the following abbreviations are used:
PP Podmeset Prose choisis. Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1957.
FM Fureur et Mystire. Paris: Gallimard, NR F, 1962.

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PA La Parole en archipel. Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1962.


NP Le nu perdu. Paris: Gallimard, NRF, 1971.
A-H Arridre-Histoiredu Pogme pulv6ris6. Paris: Jean Hugues, 1972.
NT La Nuit talismanique. Genive: A. Skira, 1972.
3

Char writes about this poem: "It was at Trayas on the border of the
Mediterranean in the winter of 1946 that the theme of "The Shark and the
Gull" imposed itself on me. I went to see Henri Matisse at Vence, and we
spoke of it. That perfect wedding haunted him. - This poem has fulfilled itself
by the foaming charm that it has procured me long after its flight, like a cock's
crowing: brutal to the soul, and master of the silence that follows" (A-H, 40);

Friedrich Hblderlin, SmrntlicheWerke, ed. Paul Stapf (Berlin und Darmstadt:


Tempel, 1958), p. 314 f., hereafter referred to as Werke. Franz Mayer, "Rend
Char et H6lderlin," Cahiers de I'Herne 15 (1971), 81-88, has attempted a comparison between the two poets. He sees the function of modern and postmodern
poetry in the anticipation of a historical reality to come: "L'avenir est ainsi,
pour Char comme pour H61derlin. . une r6alitd historique" (p. 88). It seems
to me that the kinship between the two poets lies, on the contrary, in the
attention that both give to an origin that arises within the poem, neither
before nor after. For both Hblderlin and Char the future is advenir, a present
event, rather than B venir, to come. Virginia La Charite, The Poetics and the
Poetry of Ren6 Char, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968),
sees the time-structure of Char's poetry also as derived from an attitude of
hope, turned towards the future; according to her interpretation "the great
Beginner" would mean hope "for a better future" (p. 93). This line of
interpretation was first that of Maurice Blanchot, "Rend Char," La part du feu
(Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 17. Read in such a way, poetry would again found
some kind of duration, a new era, whereas for Char and H1derlin no inception
occurs in the poem, but only its own rise and death in the present now.

Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres (Paris: Garnier, 1960), pp. 256-7:


Au bois il y a un oiseau, son chant vous arr~te et vous fait rougir.
II y a une horloge qui ne sonne pas.
II y a une fondribre avec un nid de bates blanches.
IIy a une cathbdrale qui descent et un lac qui monte.
II y a une petite voiture abandonnde dans le taillis,
ou qui descend le sentier en courant, enrubannde.
IIy a une troupe de petits comddiens en costumes,
apergus sur la route a travers la lisibre du bois.
II y a enfin, quand I'on a faim et soif, quelqu'un qui vous chasse.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres po6tiques compl4tes (Paris: Piliade, 1969), p.


817:
II y a un vaisseau qui a emport6 ma bien-aimbe.
II y a dans le ciel six saucisses....
II y a un sous-marin ennemi ....

"Das Bedenkliche ist das, was zu denken gibt.... Das Bedenkliche gibt."
Martin Heidegger, Vortrage undAufsitze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), p. 132.

"Wir versuchen, das Es und sein Geben in die Sicht zu bringen und schreiben
das 'Es' gross." Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens
(Tbingen: M.
Niemeyer, 1969), p. 5.

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"Das Brautfest ist das Begegnen jener Menschen und G6tter, dem die Geburt
derjenigen entstammt, die zwischen den Menschen und den G6ttern stehen
und dieses 'Zwischen' ausstehen." Martin Heidegger, Erl'uterungen zu
H6lderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1963), p. 98.

*"J'adressais, au mois de mai 1946, AHenri Matisse, A Vence, le manuscrit du po me


'Le requin et la mouette' compos6 quelques semaines auparavant au Trayas. Au
cours de la visite que j'avais faite au grand peintre ii n'avait pas W6tquestion d'un
poime plutbt que d'un autre. Je m'6tais persuad6 que Matisse allait bien, que ses
trdsors continuaient As'dlaborer avec la m@mesomptueuse rdgularit6qu'A I'ordinaire.
De retour A I'lsle-sur-Sorgue je lui adressais donc le manuscrit de mon poeme (J'aime
Matisse et sa bonte discrite: ce poime pour le remercier d'un acte precis). II me
r~pondit qu'il avait dans une sdrie de dessins r6cents d6couvert le m6me thbme. Voici
I'un de ces dessins." The drawing and the accompanying lines are reproduced from:
Cahiersd'Art, Paris 1945/46, p. 77. By permission of the editors of the Cahiersd'Art.

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